Normative ideals and empirical realities: Viewpoint diversity in the discourse on German arms deliveries to Ukraine

Criticism of media coverage is an essential democratic mechanism to hold journalism accountable, yet it can also foster distrust and perceptions of media bias. This study examines such tensions through the case of the German media discourse on arms deliveries to Ukraine. Using accusations of one-sided reporting as a starting point, we theorize normative expectations of media diversity in war-related policy discourse and empirically assess how leading German news outlets represented competing viewpoints. Drawing on a two-year corpus (2022-2023) from 14 Leitmedien and employing a hierarchical supervised machine-learning approach based on (large) language models, we classify stances and frames to compute standard diversity indices. The results reveal a balanced distribution of supportive and opposing stances, yet a low diversity of argumentative frames. This pattern suggests that German media exhibited a liberal-aggregative model of diversity, emphasizing coexistence of opinions over deliberative engagement with competing interpretations. Despite frequent claims of uniform pro-government bias, our findings indicate that coverage was more heterogeneous than critics claimed. However, they also point to limited argumentative depth and a tendency to reproduce existing political logics. We discuss the methodological and normative challenges of quantifying diversity, particularly under conditions of war and uncertainty, and argue that criticism of media bias often reflects broader transformations in the perception of journalistic diversity.